Voice of Customers: Lessons from Hyundai and MarketSoft

The Hyundai example shows us an innovative way to restructure a product like their 2007 Santa Fe model. This ethnographic method permitted gain a better understanding of the target customers, watching, listening, asking questions and letting customers speak freely with the researches about their lives (Kluter & Mottran, 2007).

One lesson that we have to consider compared with the experience of MarketSoft, is that Hyundai did not use a single market research method. First they defined the targeted customers and their needs conducting a segmentation study, and then the R&D team developed an interpretative translation of that research to create the concept to be tested by the Touch The Market (TTM) method.

The other lesson is related with teams and leadership. In the case of Hyundai, the groups were formed by cross-sections of the company, always looking for consensus. In the case of MarketSoft it seems that the results where strongly influenced by his founder Greg Erman, that had a strong influence (Kirsner, 2004).